Is RSS Missing a P?

Place: The Miss­ing P in RSS

I con­tinue to read arti­cle after arti­cle about RSS. These arti­cles pon­der why RSS, a supe­rior prod­uct to say e-mail or gen­eral bump­ing around the web, with a free price, and no short­age of cheer­lead­ers has not “caught on” more with the gen­eral pub­lic. Most peo­ple who actu­ally use RSS are mem­bers of the “dig­er­ati” or just plain geeks like me. To dorks like us, it makes no sense not to use RSS. We beam with delight at the lit­tle orange icon that deliv­ers rel­e­vant con­tent from the web to us like the junkies we are. Still to the major­ity of the pub­lic RSS is a mys­tery. I pro­pose that will all change, and change soon, thanks to the com­pany you prob­a­bly love to hate, Microsoft.

Let me be clear, Microsoft did not invent RSS. Microsoft, in my opin­ion, does not have the best web browser or email client. Fur­ther still, Microsoft is way behind the lead­ers in the indus­try when it comes to RSS tech­nol­ogy. Here is the thing, so are most peo­ple. Microsoft will bring RSS to the masses because of Place also known as Dis­tri­b­u­tion. Where oth­ers have failed Microsoft will suc­ceed. Here is why. A great deal of Amer­i­cans, espe­cially those in busi­ness, rely on Out­look to man­age their lives. They use it for sched­ul­ing, man­ag­ing meet­ings, and more impor­tantly for email. It is their com­mu­ni­ca­tion chan­nel. It is the soft­ware of choice for cor­po­rate Amer­ica. Peo­ple are com­fort­able using the Out­look inter­face, and it is firmly entrenched. That being stated, when you try to explain RSS and RSS Read­ers to many of these peo­ple, they go cross-eyed. “I need to go to what site?” “Atom, XML, OPML…Huh?” “My Yahoo, Per­son­al­ized Google, Fire­fox: what are you say­ing man?” It is too much work, and requires exist­ing behav­iors to change.

Sure the other 3 P’s are in line, but chang­ing habits and sys­tems is some­thing most will resist. That will change as Office 2007 is released. The new ver­sion of Out­look has a folder ded­i­cated to RSS Feeds. It deliv­ers them in a way that looks exactly like the good old fash­ioned e-mail peo­ple are com­fort­able with using. The folder fea­tures dozens of feeds that are ready to be loaded with one click and detailed instruc­tions on adding more. This is what peo­ple want. “Give me all the good fea­ture of RSS, like I want it, not like you want it.” The dif­fer­ence is sub­tle and the tech­nol­ogy is not new, but the mech­a­nism for place is a tested road. A road that peo­ple will fol­low. Sure, those of us who have been into RSS wan­dered down that road long ago. It was a road less trav­eled. With RSS embed­ded seam­lessly in Out­look, the road will be the road more trav­eled, and that will make all the dif­fer­ence. (my apolo­gies to Mr. Frost)

Those of you in Mar­ket­ing take heed. RSS will surge in pop­u­lar­ity in the next year. You need to under­stand it. It will replace or at least rein­force the meth­ods you cur­rently rely on to deliver mes­sage to the world. For those of you who, like me, love RSS and how it changes the web, look hap­pily toward the future. It is now. Do not mis­take this as cheer­lead­ing for MS. I use Gmail, which has RSS built into it already. I also use Fire­fox, Blog­lines, and tons of other geeky tools. I had an RSS prob­lem that I used these great tools to solve. Most do not. Place — the final piece in the RSS puzzle.